Romanians use 27.8 percent of their consumption expenditure to buy food and non-alcoholic beverages, the highest share in the European Union, according to Eurostat.
In 2017, households in the EU spent 12.2 percent of their total consumption expenditure on food and non-alcoholic beverages.
“The member states with more than 20 percent of their total household consumption expenditure attributed to food and non-alcoholic beverages were Romania (27.8 percent), Lithuania (21.6 percent) and Estonia (20.3 percent),” Eurostat said.
In contrast, there were four countries where the shares were less than 10 percent – Austria (9.9 percent), Ireland (9.2 percent), Luxembourg (8.9 percent) and the United Kingdom (8.2 percent).
In the EU, “food and non-alcoholic beverages” is the third most important category of household expenditure after ‘housing, water, electricity, gas and other fuels’, which accounted for 24.2 percent of household expenditure, and ‘transport’, which accounted for 13 percent.